Cit Media

Happy Thanksgiving!

This Washington Post story, “Slain Journalist’s Family Files $20 Million Lawsuit,” repeats a too-common failing: citing the amount demanded by lawyers who’ve filed a lawsuit as if the number means anything at all. It means basically zip. Lawsuits can ask for any amount of money.

Lawyers put in big numbers, often to attract press attention. (This case had already attracted attention, given the murdered man’s job as a New York Times reporter and the unfortunate circumstances of his death.) When journalists publish the amounts demanded, and even turn them into headlines, they do no journalistic service.

NY Times: ‘Ill-considered’ book, interview called off after fierce criticism. Bowing to intense pressure both outside and inside the company, the News Corp. on Monday canceled its plans to publish a book and broadcast an interview with O.J. Simpson in which he was to give a hypothetical account of how he might have murdered his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman.

Let’s see just how fully canceled these abominations really are. News Corp. could easily sell the book to another publisher, and it could sell the “interview” — from reports, little more than a two-hour promotion for the book — to another network.

Should we snicker, meanwhile, at the alleged pressure from inside Rupert Murdoch’s empire? Bill O’Reilly is shocked, shocked to learn that News Corp., which has done more to corrode honorable journalism than just about any company in recent memory, is engaged in a sleazy stunt? Sure.

Then there’s his fatuous — and utterly wrong — claim that Fox News has nothing to do with Fox network, when they’re owned by the same company and run by the same man. Ignorant or a liar. Take your pick.

Which still puts him a cut above his boss, however. Murdoch, who ultimately made the right decision, made his choices for mercenary reasons, pure and simple, when he chose to sponsor this travesty in the first place.

UPDATED

SF Chronicle: ISP not responsible for online libel, state’s top court rules. People who claim they were libeled on line can’t sue the Internet service providers that carried the messages, the California Supreme Court ruled today. The unanimous ruling reversed an October 2003 decision by a state appellate court in San Francisco that would have held carriers like Google and Yahoo to the same legal standard as newspapers and book publishers. They can be sued for the contents of a libelous message if they knew, or had reason to know, that the message was defamatory and failed to remove it.

This is an absolutely crucial decision, and it will reverberate for years to come.

No one should be advocating libelous speech — and, in fact, the libelers should be dealt with according to traditional defamation law. Nor, however, should online sites that simply host conversations be liable for other people’s speech.

I was just asked by a local radio station about this case, and the tenor of the questions suggested, at one point, that perhaps it was unfair to hold newspapers and broadcasters to a different, sterner standard. Not at all, I said: The point of the law was to encourage broad conversation where editing everything would be prohibitively difficult.

Journalists have trouble with this, as I noted a while back in critiquing a strange posting on the Poynter site. The journalist didn’t understand the difference, a stance I found odd.

The California Supreme Court got the distinction, unanimously. Whew.

NY Times: 176 Newspapers to Form a Partnership With Yahoo. A consortium of seven newspaper chains representing 176 daily papers across the country is announcing a broad partnership with Yahoo to share content, advertising and technology, another sign that the wary newspaper business is increasingly willing to shake hands with the technology companies they once saw as a threat.

To use an American football analogy, newspapers are starting to behave as though they’re doing the two-minute drill at the end of the game: trying everything in the playbook, and doing it in a hurry. In many ways, it’s about time.

The industry’s hidebound nature has kept it from making common-sense moves. One example was the ill-fated New Century Network, which rose and fell in the 1990s. It a vague attempt to think about a business model in the Internet Age. The network, which could have been useful, suffered from the publishers’ mutual inability to cooperate in a serious way. The NCN was a dud, but what’s amazing is how powerful it might have been had the publishers recognized the challenges they dismissed at the time were only delayed, not forestalled.

For Yahoo, this deal a no-brainer. It gives the company some good news as Google relentlessly carves away advertising market share not just from traditional media but also from its rival online companies. Microsoft, meanwhile, keeps threatening to be a more serious player, and no one should write off the monopolist’s moves into new arenas, even though many don’t work out so well.

Yahoo has also been a leader in the — ugh, I hate this expression — user-generated content space. It has plenty it could teach the newspapers in this regard, if the papers care to listen. (The papers can teach Yahoo a thing or two as well, including how damaging it can be to a journalistic brand when a company kow-tows to government — something the American papers did so shamelessly in the run-up to the Iraq War and Yahoo has done with its Chinese operations.)

This won’t be the only move the newspapers make to take the digital world as seriously as they must. They’ll have to try lots of ideas, acting like companies facing massive secular change, which they are.

I still don’t see how they can bring a monopoly business model successfully into an age where not only is the monopoly disappearing but the competition is most seriously from companies that want to take only the revenues and leave the journalism to someone else. Yahoo’s news portal strategy has been pretty simple: aggregate, aggregate, aggregate. It’s worked.

(Note: I’m teaching a class with Bill Gannon, editorial director at Yahoo, and I own shares in several newspaper companies.)

The Baltimore Sun reports that “College papers deliver“:

Spurred by research indicating that about 76 percent of the nation’s 6 million full-time college undergraduates read their campus papers at least occasionally, big corporations and advertisers are latching onto student-run publications.

Here’s one reason. College newspapers are relentlessly local. They cover essentially one thing — the school where they are based — and they often do it well.

After two fascinating days at the Nieman Narrative Journalism conference in Boston, I’m heading to SIME, the Scandinavian Interactive Media Event in Stockholm. Postings will be light until later on Monday.

The Nieman conference, where I spoke, was fascinating because of the quality of speakers, which was outstanding, but also because the gathering’s theme — that news must aspire to include the complexity of events, and that often, this is best accomplished by telling the stories of those affected — is so true. Journalism is above all about people.

This is why blogging and its digital relatives are so important to the future of media. It’s not that most bloggers are doing journalism — most aren’t — but rather that so many are telling their own stories, using democratized media tools in ways that have thrown open the gates and challenged the former gatekeepers.

The challenges for traditional journalists are enormous. But the potential — through welcoming, not fearing, the new voices — is even greater.

Wired Magazine’s article about the YouTube “lonelygirl” phenomenon, “The Secret World of Lonelygirl,” is full of revealing detail. But in the end it’s a paean to deception — the hoodwinking of folks as part of a business plan.

The article’s near-endorsement of the tactics lends Wired’s own credibility to the deceivers. Was that the intention? I hope not.

Blogworks: The Blogosphere Loses Transparency. It’s been a bad week for transparency and honesty in the blogosphere, demonstrating that once blogging starts making money, the rules change.

Washington Post: O.J. Deal Leaves Sour Taste in Many Mouths. The two-part, two-hour TV interview is scheduled to be aired on the Fox network Nov. 27 and 29 and was conducted by hard-charging and controversial publisher Judith Regan. The show will run before the Nov. 30 release date of Simpson’s pseudo-confessional tome, “If I Did It,” a book published by ReganBooks, a division of HarperCollins, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.

Why is the heat mostly on Murdoch’s employees, and not the boss?

Look. Murdoch had to know about the book in the first place. And if he didn’t know that the potential-blockbuster TV “interview” — in reality, a two-hour commercial for the book — was being done by another of his subsidiaries, he’s not nearly in charge of his own empire. Which defies probability, if not reality.

O.J. SImpson is beyond despicable. Judith Regan has no shame.

But let’s put the responsibility for the current outrage where it belongs, with Rupert Murdoch and his greed.